MarsEdit 3.6 is now available. This is a free update for licensed MarsEdit customers. The update has been submitted to the Mac App Store and will be available there when Apple approves the update.

This update is primarily a “bug fixes” release, that is to say, no new features. However, I am allergic to version numbers such as “3.5.10”, which was where MarsEdit was heading. I decided to jump to 3.6 with this release, on the basis of a bug-fix change with wider implications:

MarsEdit can now apply the preview filter as part of the publishing process.

This is primarily of interest to folks who write in HTML Text mode with a text filter such as Markdown, but publish to a blog that doesn’t support it natively. Now you can check a box in the blog’s settings to ensure that the preview filter runs when you publish, causing for example the Markdown content to be converted automatically to HTML as part of the publishing process. Given that MarsEdit supports custom preview filter scripts, the sky is the limit for how you choose to manipulate your post content as part of the publishing process.

Generally I strongly encourage folks to set up their blogs in such a way that Markdown can be used natively and preserved for later editing, but this is not always possible. This is a great option for folks who want the convenience of writing in Markdown but need to publish in HTML.

The change was actually made to address a change of behavior with Blogger, where historically plain text separated by newlines was automatically converted to paragraphs. They changed this behavior sometime in the past few months, so that the paragraphs are “crunched together” if you write in HTML Text mode and were relying on automatic line breaks. Using the new “Apply preview filter” feature, you can work around the bug by causing MarsEdit’s default “Convert Line Breaks” filter to process the content of your post as it is being published.

There are a number of other bug fixes in this release. Complete change notes below:

• Restore auto-configuration functionality for Blogger/Blogspot blogs
• Fix a bug where an authentication dialog was not appearing for some LiveJournal and Squarespace configurations
• Fix a bug that prevented Flickr short-name being used in Flickr page links
• Fix a bug that prevented undo from working in some editor fields
• Fix a bug that allowed rich text to be pasted into Tumblr quotation text field
• Fix a bug that caused Tumblr quotation source text to be treated as plain instead of as HTML
• Fix a bug where new image albums for Blogger were created with public permissions
• Fix a cosmetic glitch with the Date Editor panel

Enjoy!

Update: 3.6 had a bug that caused the flagship “apply preview filter” feature to fail on some blog types including WordPress and Movable Type. 3.6.1 is now available and should address the problem.

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